THE NEW YORKER more than feminism or "the newer methods of social history" -the con- trolling vision of her entire effort. Having rejected the thick lenses used by earlier historians in examining the past, Garafola supplies recent models that, sadly, turn out to be even more misshaping. As a result, she bypasses works of art quite as egregiously as Buckle did. Buckle omitted those which did not fit into his story; Garafola omits those which do not suit her theories. If Buckle's work is thoughtlessly and rather uselessly about the presumptions of class, Garafola's is determinedly and disas- trously so. Fortunately, in those instances in which one can stave off the dogmatic conclusion, and in which actual stories are allowed to unfold, Garafola's re- search pays off and her writing begins to flow. An account of the difficult lives of the non-star dancers IS persuasively felt and told, particularly in the case of the 1916 American tour , which left many hungry and nearly stranded. Here is the human despair that gives meaning to dry formula. Garafola con- vinces us that even so rarefied a group of creatures as ballet dancers can be reduced to the position of the exploited proletariat, of "pieceworkers." But that Diaghilev must therefore take on the role of the exploiting upper class blows the whole construct apart. Shrunk to the supposed characteristics of the caste he is forced to represent, this dauntingly complex character is not merely villainized but deprived of all shading of belief and experience. Economics and self-interest account for all. Every action is viewed in the light of a presumed ulterior financial motive. The 1921 London production of "The Sleeping Beauty" (retitled "The Sleeping Princess"), which by all contemporary accounts was the ob- ject of Diaghilev's obsessive and pas- sionate devotion, is treated as a cynical ploy, a kind of "Chorus Line"-a cash cow meant to raise funds for the exper- imental productions closer to his heart. That "The Sleeping Beauty" itself might have been close to his heart- and that its being so need not have excluded an ambition for experiment- is not within Garafola's philosophy. Most telling is her reading of a letter that Diaghilev wrote in reply to a request from the Paris Opéra, in 1923, to remount "Daphnis and Chloë," a - f= [ - 1 ( \ ;\.........----\__ L .r-- ...... :.- r I I' '-- 1. _ - ;;;.;--=::::=....- ,- \ 89 i \ i i I f I I II. I ij I I i" 1 '1 I' I \ I '/ .1 I 'ú "Dr. Steinhauser's experiments are concerned with the possibility of converting toxic chemical waste into booze" . decade-old ballet of F okine's. The cho- reographer had long vanished from view, but the impresario retained the rights. With delicate scruple, Dia- ghilev referred to the problem of "re- calling certain passages which certain artists of my troupe no longer remem- ber." He hesitated, requiring further consultation "in order to present the choreography in a perfect state so as to safeguard the interests of Monsieur Fokine himself." As so often, one is both grateful to Garafola for discover- ing the document and dismayed at what she makes of it. For her, Diaghilev's words demonstrate his awareness that faithfulness to an original had become "a selling point" and "an issue in an era of mechanical reproduction." (This allusion to Walter Benjamin's famous definition of our age, now a byword of Marxist aesthetics, was in- evitable, but Garafola never suggests how it might apply to the subject at hand; it is merely a tag line, uncredited and unexplained.) While Fokine, in the tradition of earlier ballet mas- ters, often restaged variants of his own works, "it was Diaghilev who prefigured the obsession with authen- . ticity so characteristic of the modern artistic marketplace," Garafola writes. That F okine was the creator of his choreography and Diaghilev was not is certainly the crucial point here, of which both men were well aware. Diaghilev concludes, "For it is his"- Fokine's-"name that will appear on the program, as author of the aforesaid choreography." The artist can change his works freely; the rest of us are bound to preserve them. Even if we proceed on the assumption that a con- cern for precise artistic intention is something of a modern sociological quirk, why is Diaghilev seen as an outside manipulator of these feelings rather than subject to them himself? G ARAFOLA makes much of her dis- covery of the booking lists for the seven performances of Diaghilev's 1908 production of the opera "Boris Godunov," in his one pre-balletic sea- son at the Paris Opéra. The lists tell us just who was sitting in the expensive seats and providing Diag hilev' s most serious patronage during that first Western season. The news she brings is that the audience was prominently